Fortress Hong Kong girds for the
WTO By Kent Ewing
HONG
KONG - This city's tourism board aspires to sell
Hong Kong to the rest of
the world as "Asia's world city." This week,
however, as the city girds for the World Trade
Organization meeting set to open December 13, they
might as well call the place "Asia's fortress
city".
With the city still reeling from a
pro-democracy march that prompted more than 80,000
demonstrators to hit the streets eight
days
ago, this week Hong Kong plays host to the
traveling circus that is also known as the World
Trade Organization.
The WTO's sixth
ministerial conference officially opens on
December 13, but the grand show, with a cast of
raucous thousands, has already begun. Many
delegates and protestors arrived before the
official kickoff. In fact, the first big anti-WTO
rally, organized by the Hong Kong People's
Alliance, a coalition of 33 local grassroots
groups, took place December 11, without incident.
But two other large marches, planned for
later in the week and involving some notorious
international groups, have the Hong Kong police
worried. They are particularly concerned about
reports of the purchase of more than 100 gas masks
by a single customer in the city's Mongkok area.
In addition, security firms claim that some of
their uniforms have been stolen from commercial
laundries, raising fears that protestors may plan
to infiltrate the conference disguised as security
guards.
Remembering the violent examples
of two previous WTO summits - one held in Seattle
in 1999, the other in Cancun in 2003 - the Hong
Kong government has taken unprecedented measures
to secure the city. Nine thousand police officers
will be on round-the-clock duty for the six-day
conference.
In Wan Chai, the area of the
city in which the WTO delegates will meet, traffic
will be redirected and police patrols - by foot,
car, motorcycle and boat - stepped up around the
Convention and Exhibition Center, the conference
site.
Protests will be restricted to
designated zones, and garbage bins have been
removed, loose pavement stones replaced and sewer
grates welded shut - all for fear that some of the
more rabid protestors might turn them into
weapons. Police have even placed wire mesh over
elevated pedestrian walkways to prevent suicide
leaps from demonstrators from dying to make a
point.
Many schools will close for at
least the first day of the summit, and Wan Chai
businesses will follow suit if things get nasty.
(It did not bode well last week when police asked
shop owners not to display any products - such as
a metal pipes, hammers and screwdrivers - that
could be used as weapons.)
Some banks,
likely targets for anti-capitalist demonstrators,
have chosen to close branches near the conference
center. And if all this did not make Hong Kong
people anxious enough, the city's 43 public
hospitals will be on high alert during the summit,
putting off elective surgery and staff holidays
while also doing their best to empty beds and
operating theaters for possible casualties.
The good news is that Hong Kong has a
history of dealing - and dealing well - with
massive protests. The most recent rally for
democracy is a case in point. The police were
exemplary in their professionalism as they
monitored the demonstrators' snake-like procession
from Victoria Park to the central government
offices.
And there have been much bigger
demonstrations in Hong Kong's recent past: 400,000
turned out for a democracy rally in 2004; 500,000
showed up in 2003. And, of course, more than a
million poured into the streets in protest after
the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989. All these
demonstrations served as models of orderly protest
and professional police behavior.
So this
week you can count on the Hong Kong police to do
their usual superior work. But they have not seen
this brand of protest before. They have faced the
relatively rational and restrained expressions of
frustration that Hong Kong people feel toward the
central government in Beijing, but they have
never confronted anything like the extreme
resentments and antagonisms stirred by the WTO.
Groups as diverse as Oxfam, Pakistani fishermen,
Argentine environmentalists and feminists and
"fair" - as opposed to "free" - traders from all
over the world will be here. In total, it is
estimated that the 11,000 or so officials and
media connected to the conference will be
supplemented by a roughly equal number of
protesters and concern groups.
The protest
contingent that scares everyone the most is
undoubtedly the Korean Peasants League, 1,500 of
whom are expected to fly into Hong Kong for the
conference. The group maintains that the WTO goal
of free agricultural trade will flood their
markets with cheap rice and wipe them out. Fair
enough, but they are also known for some of the
most extreme protest antics the world has ever
seen. In Cancun, a Korean activist stabbed himself
to death. Two more activists drank a fatal
herbicide in November as a protest against
legislation opening South Korea's rice market.
In Hong Kong, we can rest assured that no
Korean farmer will jump off a pedestrian flyover
(without, that is, landing unceremoniously in a
wire-mesh net). And, presumably, it will be
difficult to find a metal pipe, a hammer or a
screwdriver. But, at the risk of seeming to incite
the very behavior that the Hong Kong government
would like to prevent, let me point out that there
are a lot of ways to kill yourself in this city:
you can jump in the harbor, throw yourself into
traffic, dive in front of an oncoming subway train
or, for the totally unoriginal radical
demonstrator, stab yourself to death. The list
goes on.
So daunting is the task faced by
the police this week that the city's leading risk
analyst, Steve Vickers, has called the
government's decision to host the summit a
mistake. That decision was made with the idea of
showcasing Hong Kong on the world stage as a
sophisticated, well-ordered city where economic
freedoms are held dear. Over the next week,
however, the city may appear to be under siege.
In the end, this conference will be as
chaotic as the protestors make it. As in George
Orwell's famous essay, "Shooting an elephant",
ultimately it may be the mob, not the authorities,
who are in control of Hong Kong this week.
Kent Ewing is a teacher and
writer at Hong Kong International School. He can
be reached at kewing@hkis.edu.hk.
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